What are the successful strategies for reducing malnutrition among young children in East Africa?

Author

Abstract

We analyzed the role that health programs played in improving the nutritional status of children aged five years and younger in East Africa during a period when health policies aiming to reduce malnutrition were implemented. We used several waves of Demographic and Health Surveys over the 1992–2006 period for Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda. Our results show that malnutrition rates fell substantially over the sample period but that some countries then registered reversals. This finding suggests that the implementation of nutrition policies was not consistent. However, the country-level results show that different factors matter in different countries. For example, maternal health is most important in Uganda and Rwanda. Furthermore, different levels of education matter for different countries. For example, in Kenya, only the mother’s post-secondary education is significant, but in other countries, it is important to address generally low education levels to improve child nutritional health. Overall, due to resource constraints, addressing the nutritional health of young children in East Africa will continue to rely on low cost approaches, such as nationwide vaccinations and maternal education, and not on programs like conditional cash transfer schemes, which have proved successful in addressing under-nutrition in wealthy and middle-income countries.

NEP fields

Statistics

Corrections

All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hdr:papers:hdrp-2010-15. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (HDRO/UNDP). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/hdundus.html .

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

We have no references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.